


you were right all along and i hope it was worth it

by Polyhexian



Series: Humanformers: The Music AU [36]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Gen, Humanformers, POV Third Person, brainstorms having a panic attack hes completely manic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:21:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26398564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polyhexian/pseuds/Polyhexian
Summary: The one where brainstorm digs up a body
Series: Humanformers: The Music AU [36]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1859230
Comments: 3
Kudos: 33





	you were right all along and i hope it was worth it

Brainstorm wrenched his car to a halt, skidding in the wet gravel, half parked in two spaces, but unconcerned. The parking lot was empty. He kicked the door open and stumbled out into the rain, wind ripping at his clothes, moon casting oblong shadows below him as he yanked open the back door of his old sedan and grabbed the shovel he’d bought on the way there.

He checked the map he’d brought with him again, even as the pounding rain began to destroy the paper it was printed on and he cursed, scowling, and dropped it, useless. 

It wasn't far off the trail. Not nearly as far as it should be. Stupid that it had gone untouched so long. It wouldn't be hard to find. 

He began the trail at a walk, it was just under a mile he needed to head in on the trail itself before he needed to break, but by the time he reached the third blue reflective marker designating where the trail turned he was running, feet pounding through puddles and mud on the underused path, branches clawing at his skin as if they were begging him even now to turn back, as if he even could.

He hit the trail fork and took a sharp left toward a ravine that sloped out of sight and past a stone field into deep forest. Between the wind, the clanging of the shovel against stone and the rushing of blood in his ears the world was a cacophony of finality, of conclusion, of a decade and a half of searching and not God nor man nor nature could stop him now. 

When his feet hit red-orange clay he tripped, stumbled, and went head over heels, tumbling down the slope until he crashed at the bottom, narrowly missing the shovel as it embedded itself in the earth far too close to his head. He struggled to his knees, back aching where he'd struck stones and pulling himself back to his feet, hand clenched like a dead man's fist around the length of the shovel as a brace.

His vision narrowed into a tunnel when he spotted the v-shaped tree from the article where the cadaver dog had indicated, grown taller now and surrounded by periwinkle blue flowers, just like a grave.

He grabbed them in fistfuls as he ripped them from the ground and tossed them to the side, then reared up and slammed the blade of the shovel into the base of the tree, gashing it open, then reared back and hit it again, and again, before it cleaved through and brought it down. He kicked the large part of the tree out of his way and buried the shovel beneath it in the earth, tearing at the weeping stump, wet hands slipping on the handle as he slammed his foot on the flat end of the tool and dug deeper.

The stump eventually came free and was discarded with the rest of it as he tore at the soil with the shovel, frenzied and frantic, vision spinning circles with the wild weather as he went deeper, before he hit something with a thunk and threw the tool to the side, dropping to his knees in the sludge and tore at the dirt with his hands, leaving finger-shaped gouges in the earth.

And then he hit something solid.

With bleeding fingers he dug out his find, clawing at the edges of it until he had cleared enough dirt with the help of the rain that he was sure what he had found.

A human skull.

The nearly-but-not-completely fused sutures along the skull gave it the right age, late teens, not yet twenty but not entirely a child, but it was what was clinging to the eye sockets that confirmed it. The gold rimmed glasses, or what was left of them, bent into the orbital sockets and molded against the shape of the skull that Brainstorm held in his trembling palms was all he needed to know for sure.

“I was right!” he said, out loud, holding it aloft, before he giggled, then chuckled, then broke out into manic laughter that wracked his overstrained body, chest gasping for air, “I told them, I told them, I was right all along, the whole time, I was right!”

He stared at the skull, face split open in a smile, before his hands started shaking so hard he feared he might drop it. The skull stared back at him.

“Oh, God,” Brainstorm said, smile fading as he finally began to feel the freezing temperature of the stormy night, “Oh, god. I was right.”

He dropped the skull back into the mud and kicked away from it, scrabbling in the clay as he tried to climb backwards out of the hole he dug.

“Oh, god, oh, god, I was right,” he sobbed, voice rising toward a shriek, too deep in the forest for anyone to hear him, as fifteen years of deeply compartmentalized grief struck him like a 1998 Timberland boot to the chest.


End file.
